While we’re still waiting for 802.11n to be approved, but we’re happily using it (with some consequences that devices don’t interoperate), the IEEE has ratified the 802.11r Wifi roaming standard, aka Fast Basic Service Set Transition. A pretty significant standard actually, especially with municipal/community Wifi in mind, covering large areas.
802.11r is a standard that lets Wifi devices roam quickly between access points, in less than 50ms, quick enough to keep a voice call alive. This much improves VoIP over Wifi and mobile browsing with minimal disruptions caused by changing access points and channels. Current roaming delays in 802.11 networks average in the hundreds of milliseconds, up to several seconds, as these 802.11 standards were originally defined with single access points in mind. While some have proclaimed 802.11 a/b/g/n… to be near-dead in favour of 3G mobile broadband or WIMax, this 802.11r standard proves it’s still alive and kicking.
Read on at DailyWireless.
Network World describes the situation on some university campusses, where more and more students pack a laptop and other wifi enabled devices, and are streaming youtube and personal media over the network.
Early WLANs focused on growing the number of access points to cover a given area. But today, many wireless administrators are focusing more attention on scaling capacity. That focus is a broad one, calling for a deeper understanding of what access points are capable of, and paying more attention to scaling back-end systems, servers and networks.
Multimedia use is surging, and 802.11n is expected to make it surge still more. All these universities are configuring their wireless LANS for multicast support, to minimize bandwidth demands where possible. Users in effect tune into a single multicast stream (analogous to viewing broadcast TV) rather than each one receiving his or her own separate, unicast stream.
Read on at Network World.
Wednesday, Aug 13th, 2008
Categories: Meraki
Meraki is introducing more changes:
- Meraki Indoor
- End of life of the Standard Edition line of products
- Prices now start at $149
The Meraki Indoor improves upon the Meraki Mini by adding built-in signal strength LEDs, a hardware watchdog for withstanding power fluctuations and a sleeker enclosure with a built-in antenna…
We are also announcing the end of life of our Standard Edition (ad-supported) products, which will no longer be available to new customers after January 31, 2009…
As an existing Standard Edition customer, your networks will continue to operate normally and Meraki will continue providing hosted services for the lifetime of the product. As part of our streamlined product offering, your networks will have certain features enabled in Dashboard which were previously only available in Pro Edition, including custom images on splash pages and unlimited device whitelisting.
Thursday, Jul 31st, 2008
Categories: Media
Great article comparing bandwidth to oil, in the NYTimes:
“Americans today spend almost as much on bandwidth as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cellphones, cable television and Internet connections, which is about what we spend on gas and heating oil.”
Interesting comparison. Read on at NYTimes.com.
How much do you spend on bandwidth (internet, mobile, cable tv,…)? I think I’ve been payment roughly the same amount for ten years now, though I do get more speed and data (and voice, sms…) allowance.
Laurel Papworth talked about “Social Network Telecommunications - the Consumer as ISP” at the Broadband Australia 2008 summit.
Social networks will want always on, ambient, mobile connectivity so that they can take advantage of these services.
She mentioned Fon, Meraki, Open-Mesh and Free Australia Wireless.
Check out her presentation on Slideshare.
We need more people, more often talking about these issues, so the industry (telco’s, isp’s,…) and government can’t no longer ignore this trend.
Tomizone is having a promotion targetted at iPhone and iPod touch users. Using your Apple device, you get free acces for three months or a maximum of 500Mb, whichever comes first. There are currently (apparently) 1000 Tomizone hotspots, but only a handful in Sydney. You might as well make use of it (if you’re around one).
Monday, Jul 21st, 2008
Categories: Meraki
Sasha Meinrath ponders about what’s wrong with Meraki: “Black Box Technologies, Lock-In, & Hidden Costs“.
Hundreds of projects, organizations, and municipalities are rolling out Meraki-based networks, yet few seem to understand that they’re buying a bundled service not just a piece of hardware. Over time, these initiatives will end up paying an unknown amount of money to Meraki just to keep their system running.
Do check out the comments, as Sanjit Biswas (Meraki CEO) answers some of his concerns.
On the other hand, on GovTech.com Sanjit Biswas presents another use case of Meraki’s being deployed in a small town center. In early 2008, Prestonsburg lit up a free Wi-Fi hotzone over a 2-mile corridor running through its downtown core, using 48 outdoor units and 12 indoor units, for a total price of $8500 (including three DSL connections with two years worth of service for $2700). Not too shabby for a local municipality, I guess.
“For Prestonsburg and many other customers, Meraki includes three years of its data center services in the price of the hardware”, Biswas said, “Larger customers can opt for a plan that discounts the hardware, but adds a monthly fee for service”.
So apparently “three years, that’s how long most of our larger customers plan to wait before upgrading to newer radio devices” according to Biswas, but that’s not how I (and Sasha Meinrath) read it.
NETGEAR recognises the power of Open Source and introduces its new OS based router WGR614L and the NETGEAR Open Source Router Community:
The latest NETGEAR open source wireless router is the WGR614L: the open wireless router platform of choice for serious developers and newer users alike. Flexible and powerful, the WGR614L can support many popular third party firmware applications, including DD-WRT, Tomato, and Sveasoft.
As most new consumer routers do, it also supports guest access via a separate SSID. All this starting at 69 USD.
Valerie Khoo blogs at SMH about Sex and the City, where the ladies are tech-conscious.
If an utterly trivial movie like Sex and the City can recognise how important technology is - and how we are increasingly reliant on being connected in order to do business - isn’t is a shame the state government can’t see it the same way.
Maybe I should go see it then…
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom gets the point, over at San Francisco’s SFGate:
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said Wednesday that citywide wireless Internet access is slowly becoming a reality despite political infighting - and that 144,000 residents will be surfing the Web for free by the end of the year at no cost to the city.
He’s talking about the Meraki network of course:
Newsom is calling the idea Wi-Fi 2.0 - a nod to his high-profile but unsuccessful first attempt to bridge the “digital divide” between San Franciscans who take Internet access for granted and low-income people who can’t easily log on to e-mail, find job listings or surf news sites.
The mayor’s office is working to ensure that single-room-occupancy hotels and public housing projects are some of the first to receive the devices because residents there typically don’t have Internet access. Five public housing projects now have the technology, and 13 more are expected to have it by the end of the year, Newsom said.
As large-scale, for-profit projects falter, innovative new models emerge, as John Cox writes on NetworkWorld:
Strictly speaking, the community networking projects don’t require municipal involvement at all. They are self-organized, self-funded local movements that use a variety of technologies, both open source and modified commodity products, to share existing broadband services, such as DSL connections. And they use the unlicensed radio bands for wireless access.
“We need to get back to the original rationales [of] why we should be building these networks in the first place,” Sascha Meinrath, research director, Wireless Future Program, at the New America Foundation says. “Personally, I’m business model agnostic. I’m far more focused on how these models meet the social and economic justice
needs of the communities they serve.”
The article further covers 10 interesting muni wifi projects, including San Fran’s Meraki network, PTP, a wireless crime-fighting video network, and others.